Wednesday, June 10, 2009

In the wake of the murder of George Tiller last week, two news items seem worthy of particular note: first, the statement made earlier this week by Tiller's accused killer, Scott Roeder, that "there are many other similar events planned around the country as long as abortion remains legal"; and second, the news this morning that Tiller's clinic, Women's Health Care Services, will not re-open--news that was both "hailed and mourned" by all the usual figures on both sides of the argument. Those who opposed Tiller and the practice of late-term abortion called it a "bittersweet announcement," while those who supported him in his work pointed that that the closest abortion provider to Wichita, Kansas's largest city, is now a three-hour drive away, in Overland Park. If nothing else, this may mean that, for the time being anyway, Wichita may longer be the red-hot center of the abortion wars.

Which may be going away, anyway, certainly if President Obama has anything to do with it. No, I'm not saying he's changed his mind about abortion rights; his position is still the same, and so my doubts still remain. Still, what to make of his appointment of Alexia Kelley to oversee faith-based initiatives for the Department of Health and Human Services (initiatives which, it must be noted, Obama is on record for having praised, and wanting to expand)? It's an appointment that's being attacked by liberal defenders of abortion rights, of course, even though her opposition to the practice is solidly grounded in the "common good" rhetoric of compromise that anyone who listens to Obama carefully is bound to hear again and again. And, of course, cynics could argue that it's just a bone being thrown to opponents of abortion rights. But I wonder if something larger is going on.

My old friend Matt Stannard, as many socialist beliefs as we may share, is much more broadly progressive than I, and as such he has far fewer traditionalist or religious reservations about abortion rights that I do. But that being said, he still recognizes the validity of qualms about the practice, and is mildly optimistic that today, in the wake of Tiller's murder, and with the Republican party's over-reliance upon white, Protestant anti-abortion rights voters having resulted in arguably a near-complete marginalization of their party, the time is right for a new "progressive pro-life" movement to emerge. He writes:

[T]here is a pluralistic religious basis for finding abortion morally objectionable and regrettable, but not worthy of a murder charge, and not worthy of preventative assassination. That alternative is the view that most people "on the fence," and quite a few people on both sides, hold whether they're explicitly aware of it or not. This type of belief requires empathy....It requires a commitment to religious pluralism. It requires a sense of interconnectedness and mutual submission. It requires humility. It does not require the abandonment of core Christian beliefs, though it might demand of its adherents a skeptical attitude towards the pronouncements of purported Christian authorities. Such skepticism won't scare off those who are drifting towards progressivism, though, since they are probably a corollary to the increasing number of Americans professing agnosticism and atheism. We are slowly drifting towards the liberalization and democratization of religion, and progressive Christians would rather work with nonbelievers than potential Pat Robertsons or, to be sure, Scott Roeders....

Since the only solution that would satisfy all parties in the abortion debate is one which renders unwanted pregnancy either impossible to begin with (a question of technological possibility) or completely without material inconvenience (a question of political economy), these are the directions we should take our debates. Progressives now control all sides of the abortion debate. Pro-life consciousness is the consciousness of the interconnectedness of all life and death....Tied to an emerging group of fair-minded, socially-committed activists, it has the potential to take the national debate about abortion to an entirely new level: a progressive level. Economic justice is pro-life. Anti-war is pro-life. Anti-death penalty is pro-life. Universal health care is pro-life. Punishing women for sexuality is pro-death. Insisting on abstinence education programs that undoubtedly fail is pro-death....

In other words, pro-life and pro-choice progressives can continue to debate about abortion, but within a larger frame of agreement about the world we're working toward. Eventually, that debate will become very different, much more beautiful, complex, and educational, than it is today. I'm declaring the relevant part of the abortion debate to be post-violence, post-restriction, and post-conservative. I imagine fair-minded people may find exceptions to this declaration, but my guess is that an increasing number of pro-lifers will move in that threefold direction in the months and years to come.

Read the whole thing; it was of the strongest expressions of left-leaning idealism that I've read in the blogosphere for a long time. And it is, in every way, a progressive idealism, in ways that I like and ways that I don't. I'd like to hope that I'm one of hose "fair-minded people" he talks about, and so hopefully, if his projected movement does become a reality, we will be able to talk fairly about the degree to which we can, in the midst of "the liberalization and democratization of religion" (moralistic therapeutic deism, perhaps?), nonetheless see a way as a community or nation to respect, or at least grant as worthy of some legitimate balancing, the concerns of those of us whose approach to abortion (to say nothing of other issues) is informed by "the pronouncements of purported Christian authorities." I think this is important, because I strongly suspect that some of the strongest voices for the social justice principles which undergird Matt's progressive ideals are going to bound up in exactly that kind of traditionalism and respect for community and authority (as some strong leftists troubled by abortion have admitted in the past) even if the context for that respect is inevitably going to involve greater pluralism than in the past.

What does that mean? It means holding on to, and finding ways of articulating, "these things [that] are old" (as Obama put it in his Inauguration Address) in the midst of change, and that will mean attempting to find new ways of expressing peoples' beliefs and concerns. It will mean changing debates, perhaps by bringing surprising voices into the conversation, as Obama's appointment of Kelley has possibly done. It means, for example, insisting that abortion is an evil, while admitting that the best way to deter people from choosing it or reduce the number who do so is to work on supporting mothers and parents and neighborhoods and jobs and all those things that surround the decisions people make. If Matt's progressive pro-life movement would allow for language like that, then more power to him (and to it). I would definitely sign up.

Some will never be satisfied, of course, and not just terrorists like Scott Roeder. The Obama administration supports abortion rights vigorously, but it also supports legislation designed to support pregnant women in their choices, and such action is often seen by opponents as a distraction from the "real" issue. "You don't have to have a lot of social programs to cut down on abortions," some say. Ross Douthat might well agree with them--I suspect because, ultimately, his opposition to abortion is grounded in his religious convictions about the status of the fetus, which means that as interesting as various regulations and conditions and support structures may be to him, he probably wants to be able to talk about (as Scott Lemieux I think correctly notes) those times and situations where abortion simply should simply be forbidden, save for some extremely rare and desperate exceptions. So perhaps we can't avoid coming back around the issue of religious authority, and the possibility that the progressive pro-life position that Matt's--and perhaps Obama's too--efforts point towards will necessarily involve some sort of show-down between those who want their civic religion to include some kind naturally grounded absolutes, and those who are willing to ground it more subjectively. I'm not comfortable on either side of that show-down (I'm a hermeuntist who thinks truth comes through subjectivity, after all!), though I'm clearly more on the former than the latter. In the end, I hope that the Roeders of the world won't force me to take a side...or rather, will allow me to work in my own small way with the one (progressive) side towards the goal of reducing abortions, while still keeping one respectful foot on the other (traditionalist) side, with its willingness to acknowledge the occasional appropriateness of laying down the law. And maybe, if I'm lucky, Obama's common good rhetoric will work it's magic as the time goes by, and straddling that particular divide eventually won't be such a pain. If I'm lucky, that is.

5 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Russell,

Just a word about Alexia Kelley, who is a good friend. She's about the best person imaginable for the job at HHS. A commmitted progressive who is pro-life to the roots, she is also steeped in Catholic social teachings and has good and active connections with various religious Christian and Jewish faith-based organizations.

In a matter of a few years she built Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good into the pre-eminent progressive Catholic public policy organization in the country.

I say this to confirm your sense that her appointment is particularly revealing of where Obama is headed on these matters.

Steve! Thanks for commenting, and for sharing your insight into Kelley. I've only become familiar with Alliance for the Common Good through your own blogging (I'd heard of it before, but hadn't followed its writings or activities at all), but what I've seen has impressed me greatly. If Kelley's the primary mover and shaker behind the organization, then in speaks very well of Obama's judgment indeed.

Not that such resolves all the sorts of concerns that someone thinking about how to properly preserve or extend a certain kind of morally or religiously grounded response to abortion (and other matters) into the public sphere (something much needed now, in the wake of Bush's abuses of just such things, as well as the liberal overreaction against any kind of religious leftism), but such conceptual concerns are hardly to be intransigently insisted upon in the face of the possibility of real progress on abortion reduction. That's something the Douthats of the world need to keep in mind.

Thank you for your kind words about my post, Russell. I suspect that much of our disagreement will revolve around the "post-restriction" environment to which I believe a genuinely constructive pro-life discussion must now subscribe. What needs to happen is for pro-life progressives to completely break away from ANY politics, activism, and policy prescriptions of the right. More later (perhaps on The Underview) ---as I am about to fix lunch for kids and friends.

You won't get any real traction with a progressive pro-life movement as long as the primary candidates for abortion reduction are underage, poor, or otherwise disadvantaged women. I imagine that this is partly what matt is referring to in his comment. And I caution you in no uncertain terms that Douthat will never be your ally in such an effort.

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."